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Six Sentence Sunday – Suzie’s Nightmare – Chapter 1

Here’s a snippet from my novel I’m working on rewrites for at the moment. Hoping to have it ready to start sending around in the next couple of months.

Setup: Suzie and Fred are a couple of kids who stumbled upon a very unusual scene in the woods of their subdivision. Little do they know this is just the beginning of the horrors they’ll find as the mystery unravels.

The blood didn’t just stop at the ground level either, and in fact went up the sides of several trees in the clearing. Much farther up in fact, so that the victim must have been off the ground when it was attacked.

“There’s so much of it,” Suzie whispered, hating how loud her voice sounded out here.

Fred’s voice was hushed as though he was thinking aloud. “It must have been pretty big to have had so much. But how did it get so high?”

This is a pretty dark YA piece that I’ve been working on for the past year. What can I say? My first novel needs a bunch of edits before I’ll be comfortable testing the waters. I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s too dark to be considered YA though. It’s a blurry category, so I’m torn with it.

Well that certainly gives me some encouragement! I went to a YA panel at Dragon*Con over the weekend, and got a good spectrum about how dark some YA work is out there. I guess compared to some pieces, mine is pretty tame!

Thanks Monica, I really enjoy setting up the atmosphere in my pieces. After all, that’s usually half of what makes it horror to begin with! Besides even kids know when they should keep their voices down after all.

Really really interesting six. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as “too dark” in YA nowadays. There is such a wide variety in YA right now! And I’m very interested to know exactly what these two found!!